Cedilla (18 page)

It took me ages to chasten these flourishes and exorcise the cedillas from my
c
s. I loved making those expressive little hooks, dainty curls like stray typographic eyelashes. I wanted to study them under laboratory conditions, magnifying them to see if each cedilla had a little cedilla of its own, and so on down into unthinkable realms of subordination … in my mind’s eye, my mind’s microscope, the inside curve of each cedilla had the dull gleam of something whetted and oiled, like the edge of an infinitesimal sickle.

Little
c
s have lesser
c
s upon their tails to bite ’em / Lesser
c
s have lesser
c
s, and so
ad infinitum
! Unless it might happen that electron microscopy revealed at supreme magnification some final clinger-on, some depender without dependants, the loneliest and most necessary of his kind, his perfect uselessness underwriting a sense of purpose for all the rest.

Eckstein was scrupulous, within the limits of his abrasiveness, to let me down lightly. He explained that although the word cedilla is Spanish and means ‘little z’, the mark itself does not feature in the modern language, or not in the Castilian master-dialect which was
the only one possible to study in schools. I was disappointed but my fondness for the little diacritic held firm. Curaçao was still my favourite drink, of all the ones I had never tasted.

What Eckstein alleged about the absorptive powers of teenaged memory certainly seemed to be true of mine. It seemed to be actively hungry rather than passively registering, and I trained it to do tricks. I threw random scraps to its surplus capacity. I would memorise shopping lists and reel them off to an amazed (or mildly diverted, or not quite bored) audience. Once Dad thought he’d caught me out, until I explained that it was more of a challenge to retain last week’s shopping list rather than this one’s. I made him dig the old list out of the kitchen drawer and check every item, rather than take my word for it.

I performed just as willingly with numbers. The trick was to forge associative links – to impose a grammar on numbers, building on their resemblances to creatures or objects. So 2 was represented by a swan, 6 by an elephant’s trunk, 1 by a magic wand, and to establish 261 firmly in your memory all you had to do was think of a swan eating an elephant that is waving a wand.

Possibly Mum and Dad thought these hobbies were morbid signs of some sort. They wanted me to make some friends outside school, which in my special case meant ‘outside the school buildings’, to have things to do in the evenings. And so did I, but their idea was that I should go to a meeting of the Young Conservatives, described by Dad as ‘a nice bunch of youngsters’. The Bourne End meeting place of this cult wasn’t far away, by the level crossing, within wheelchair range so that I wouldn’t need to be delivered like a child to a birthday party.

I agreed, to keep them happy. This was a very abstract display of independence (of ‘independence’ prescribed by someone else!). I didn’t want to go where I was going – I was going there because I could. But I did always love going over the level crossing in the Wrigley, bumping outrageously over the uneven sleepers, almost willing myself to come a cropper. If I’d got stuck and been duly mashed I dare say Mum would never have forgiven herself and the Young Conservatives.

It turned out that their lair was well defended. The only access was by way of a metal spiral staircase. I wasn’t having that. I wasn’t going to ask someone to carry me up such a frightening structure for the sake of company I didn’t want. I went to the Red Lion instead, and drank there till closing time. I can’t say I had a whale of a time, but at least I was in a place I had chosen for myself, and someone put ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ on the jukebox. A nice young man in a floral shirt came over to see if I was all right, saying if there was anything I wanted I should just give a shout. I began to wonder if I hadn’t stumbled on a ‘queer pub’ just round the corner from home, hitting the jackpot with my first pull on the handle. What luck! I wouldn’t have to go to the extreme lengths favoured by Boyde Ashlar (I had no idea how to find a Turkish Baths, let alone get myself through its turnstile). This nice young man was positively chatting me up. He twinkled at me. Nothing was too much trouble. Then I realised that this lad had found the easiest possible way of impressing a girlfriend with his essential niceness on a first date, bouncing a twinkle at me for her benefit. If I’d been a kitten stuck up a tree outside the pub I’d have served his turn just as well. After that I had no qualms about letting him refill my glass. Pathos has a price, and it was the least he could do. This stranded kitten doesn’t come cheap.

Mum and Dad had left the door of Trees open for me as usual. The system was that the door of the bedroom I shared with Peter (when he was in residence), which gave access to the outside world, stayed open except when we all left the house. It stayed open even in cold weather, though on days of actual snow it might be closed when a few satisfying flurries had been admitted. The gain in convenience – the easy flow of unescorted wheelchairs in and out – easily outweighed any inconvenience of temperature. If I couldn’t circulate freely myself then I could at least give the air that privilege. It was better than a consolation prize, a pleasurable sensation in its own right.

When I came in that night I was exhilarated out of all proportion to the actual pleasures of my night out. I had mounted an expedition solo, across the tracks and back, over an unknown threshold, and I had come back safe. Peter came in just after me, from his pub job at the Spade Oak Hotel. I sang at the top of my voice while he helped prepare me for bed. I sang ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, inevitably, with
particular repetition of the bit about calling out for another drink and the waiter bringing a tray.

Next morning Mum came in beaming to ask about my big evening out. My late-night song recital seemed to indicate a social breakthrough. She wanted all the details of my evening of Tory glory. It was only when I told her I hadn’t gone to the Young Conservatives after all that the atmosphere became suffused with toxins. Mum went quite white. It was one thing for me to engage in alcoholic carousal with Young Conservatives, quite another to do anything of the sort at the Red Lion. That was beyond the pale, and my singing of a cryptic Procol Harum ballad suddenly changed from a natural burst of exuberance to a sinister display of drunkenness, though I missed the same number of notes either way. The song might just as well have been ‘The Red Flag’ for all the legitimate entertainment it provided. Mum’s face, at first just ghastly, turned a darker shade of puce, and then she stalked off.

She didn’t speak to me for four days. She thought I’d been drinking, and as she didn’t ask me outright I didn’t volunteer any information. I’d stuck to soft drinks, naturally, being under age. Arguments about my behaviour raged through the house without my needing to participate, which was often the way. Once I heard the phrase ‘ – showed a little initiative –’ in Dad’s voice between two door-slammings. That must have been him standing up for me, welcome proof that he could come through with the goods in my defence when he was really up against it.

Dad was a much happier organism altogether, working in the personnel department of BOAC, than he had been as a sub-standard salesman for Centrum Intercoms, his first job after leaving the services. BOAC gave him back some of the sense of himself he had enjoyed in the RAF. He was a bit of a hermit crab, I suppose, when it came to the world of work. He needed the right sort of job – one with a proper chain of command – to give him a shape and a home. Otherwise he felt defenceless, skulking between shells.

During the school holidays I wanted to make a trip to London, to see where he worked. Joy Payne, best of neighbours, a joy to all and a bringer of pain only to herself, volunteered to drive me. So I phoned him up to ask for directions. Normally Dad enjoyed giving this sort
of help. I had once seen him with my own eyes writing page after page of directions, with his fountain pen, for the benefit of some passing stranger. How much keener would he be when he was guiding his own son! I was sure a visit from me would increase his standing in the office.

I spoke to his secretary, who was lovely. We had a good long chat, but when Dad finally came on the line he was very short with me. I had used up all my charm on the secretary, and had no reserves left for someone who sounded much more like a stranger than she did. If I had been a salesman I could have got Dad’s secretary to sign up for anything, but from the man himself I got the bum’s rush.

Dad was cheerful again by the time he got home. ‘I’ve told my secretary not to put you through again under any circumstances. She’ll get fired if she lets it happen again. She should have known better, and now she does. So don’t bother trying to repeat today’s little trick.’

I was stung. How was it a trick to phone your father? I tried to argue my way out of this unexpected disgrace. ‘What if there’s an emergency?’

‘Such as?’

I didn’t have an answer ready. ‘Well … what if Mum dropped dead?’

‘Then what on earth would be the point of phoning me about something like that? Show some sense – phone the undertaker instead. I’ll find out soon enough when I get home.’

This wasn’t a very tactful conversation to be having with Mum in the room, perhaps. Her smile was a rather blighted thing. It wasn’t Dad who introduced the subject of death – I have to put my hand up to that. He certainly capitalised on it.

I wonder if Dad did actually have the power to fire his secretary for her insubordination in putting through an unauthorised call from a civilian. There was probably a more complex procedure to be gone through, the equivalent of a court-martial – a court-bureaucratic.

At weekends, obviously, Broyan wasn’t at my disposal. If I wanted an outing I had to make my own arrangements. That was where the
rail system came in. I was never quite so gone on rail travel as Mum, but I can’t deny that it served me well. There was a system, or rather there wasn’t a system – which turned out to work much better than any formal set of arrangements could have done. I would simply turn up at Bourne End station and be loaded, Wrigley and all, into the goods van. I was treated as sentient luggage. It was glorious.

I would be asked where I was going, of course, but only so that I could be retrieved and off-loaded at the proper time. No mention was ever made of tickets or fares. This can’t have been an official dispensation, I don’t think – otherwise, surely, the goods van would have been piled high with wheelchairs and their occupants. And there would have been paperwork. It was just a blind eye being turned, a perk extended, without comment, to me personally. Unless a background murmur of marvellous-how-the-little-fellow-seems-to-manage counts as comment.

The sheer novelty of a wheelchair-bound person having an appetite for unaccompanied travel worked in my favour, I’m sure. Still, British Rail and its employees have access to this mystical truth, if no other: the body is always and everywhere luggage.

On one trip, a very neatly-turned-out guard came to have a chat. He was chummy as well as smartly dressed but I felt deeply uncomfortable about my ambiguous status and blurted out, ‘Shouldn’t you be making me buy a ticket?’

The guard said, ‘I can if you like, but I’d much rather not. You’re not in a proper passenger seat, are you? Then if I charged you for your travel, which includes the right to a seat, you could make a complaint that you’d brought your own seat with you and been charged for another one. We could charge you as luggage, but then we’d have to work out what the proper price should be. We might have to weigh you on the platform before putting you on the train, and then there’d be the driver waiting and passengers fretting. All things considering, it’s best to leave well alone. Just come along when you want to go travelling and we’ll see you right. If it’s cold we can always find you a blanket, and if you want a bit of company just sing out.’

At Slough I was duly unloaded onto the platform. I was going to see The Who in concert – which was a ticket that had to be paid for in full. I could only hope to be an honorary parcel on special occasions.
The last thing I heard before I notched the Wrigley into top speed and raced off in the direction of the concert hall was a final refrain of ‘Ruddy miracle, that little cripple kiddie’, well-meant but a bit lowering. Oi! Less of the cripple. Less of the kiddie. Less of the little.

When The Who started playing I nearly leapt out of the Wrigley in forgetfulness of the body. The noise ripped right through me. It turned me into one big throbbing ear, an ear on the edge of pain. Just as well, really, since I couldn’t see a thing. I took up various positions in the crowd as it heaved around me, but either there were people in front of me blocking my view or else I was in the lee of the stage and couldn’t see up.

On stage in Slough, The Who were offering a sort of masterclass in non-dualist philosophy. While they were playing, it was obvious that there was only one thing in the universe, one thing in any possible universe, and that was this noise.

Then in a break between songs there was a girl shouting something in my ear. ‘John, it’s Barbara from school.’ I hardly recognised her out of uniform. Barbara Broier in purple tights and a very short skirt. Schoolgirls in particular looked quite different at weekends, though the boys were beginning to run them close, what with bright shirts and bell-bottomed velvet trousers. I was the odd one out, looking much of a muchness throughout the week, in school or at large. ‘Can you see anything?’ she was asking.

‘Not really, but it doesn’t matter. I can hear everything.’ I could hear my ears bursting.

‘It’s just Susan and I were thinking …’ The next song drowned out what it was that they were thinking, but I soon cottoned on when they put it into practice. They were thinking that they could tip the wheelchair backwards a bit so as to give me a view of the stage.

It was a kind idea, but I’m not sure that the girls realised how heavy the Wrigley was. They had seen the twins handling the unwieldy Tan-Sad at school, but the Savages had the benefit of lots of practice, as well as being coördinated almost on the genetic level. The Wrigley had the added weight of its motor. The girls gave me some sort of wobbling view, but I didn’t exactly feel secure in their hands. I wasn’t even sure the visual side of things, when I got it, added all that much. Townshend the guitarist had a huge conk of a
nose, and Daltrey the singer had a huge everything, wild eyes, madly curling hair, giant teeth. Entwistle the bass guitarist seemed to be fast asleep, and my eyes were drawn mainly to the drummer, so dapper and pretty however frantically he pounded his kit alongside the ill-favoured others. Keith Moon. They were playing ‘I Can See for Miles and Miles …’, one of my favourites, admittedly for reasons that weren’t strictly musical.
Patrick
played it on the guitar and had shown me how simple the strange-sounding chords actually were, with a single configuration of fingers which he slid methodically across the frets.